3 Reasons You Might Have Been Affected By Google Panda

Yesterday I posted about the negative impact the Google Panda changes are having on all sorts of websites, and with each day that passes, more webmasters are realizing they have been affected by the black and white bear of search. I thought it might be useful to offer a few tips on how to fight back for those sites that have been affected. Please bear in mind (no pun intended), that these tips are based on general research and my experience of the changes.

Eliminate Spammy On-site Links

If you have spammed your footer or sidebar with longtail keywords in an attempt to gain extra “Google points” then you may well have felt the force of the panda. Unless these links are linking to relevant and visible pages in your sitemap, then this could be a reason for loss of rankings. Don’t just use longtails in links to target the search spiders; you need to be smarter and make sure those links lead to contextually related pages on a number of levels; header, keyword density in content, content in-linking and external linking, etc.

Put A Mask On Your Affiliation

Affiliate marketers seem to have been hit pretty badly this time around, and looking at some of the poor quality affiliate sites around it is no wonder why. “Is this a scam or not” style sites aren’t favoured by the panda, and neither is over affiliation, i.e. every link is an affiliate link. Matt Cutt’s once famously said, and I am paraphrasing here, “affiliate sites are an unnecessary link in the chain between user and seller”. With that in mind, you might want to consider how you might make your site look like more than just an affiliate site.

Stop Them Bouncing & Increase Your Speed

Only the other day did I write about the new Google site speed tool. If your site is moving like a snail then it isn’t user-friendly in Google’s eyes. Similarly, if your bounce rate is 90%+, you have serious content issues you need to address.